�Any
attack on freedom is the business of every American. We are the land
of the free and the home of the brave. It is time to stand up and
fight for our health.� --Byron J. Richards, author of Fight for
Your Health � Exposing The FDA�s Betrayal of America

Most people
think that The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was created to
protect the public from harm and to make sure that manufacturers
followed the law in developing, testing and marketing their products.
With the almost daily revelations about the corruption in medical
research and drug development that have been splattered across the
pages of the public press over the last year, a topic Dr. Carolyn
Dean and I first wrote about in our column, The
Constant Gardener � Does Art Imitate Life?, it is now dawning
on people that they can�t believe everything they hear from the
FDA about the safety of the products it approves for sale in the
marketplace.

According to
figures posted on the FDA�s website, the FDA regulates products
valued at a trillion dollars a year � a number that represent 25%
of all consumer spending in America. These products include food,
drugs, medical devices, biologics (e.g. vaccines), animal feed and
drugs, cosmetics, radiation-emitting devices (e.g. cell phones),
and combination products (which combine two or more regulated products).

My first realization
that the FDA�s real mission was not to protect the public from harm
but apparently something quite different came in May of 1992 when
I read a copy of the FDA�s Dietary Supplements Task Force Final
Report. In this report, from an agency that is supposedly working
diligently for you and me to make sure the products it regulates
are safe, and not to protect the drug industry�s business interests,
FDA personnel concluded, in writing, that the FDA�s mission was
to remove dietary supplements from the shelves as they represented
a �disincentive for patented drug research.�

Around the
same time this task force report was published, FDA agents conducted
a flak-jacketed gunpoint raid into the patient-filled office of
famed nutrition expert, Jonathan Wright, MD, assaulting his patients
in an apparent effort to stop him from engaging in further treatment,
and at the same time confiscating his patient records for what appeared
to be the future prosecution of the Harvard-and-University of Michigan-trained
MD. Details of this raid were covered in Dr. Dean�s first column
for News with Views called, Kiss
Your Vitamins Goodbye.

Had it wanted
to, the FDA could not have done a better job of arousing public
opinion, first by announcing its intention to take dietary supplements
off our shelves (valuable products that millions depended upon for
their personal health), and then by assaulting patients in a doctor�s
office while they were still hooked up to IVs getting vitamin treatments.
Since then, ordinary citizens across the country have forged a mighty
army committed to fighting for control of our medical choices against
government overseers who act like guardians of the gate to protect
the professional territories of certain select doctor groups, big
pharma and other large corporations that profit from our being sick.

One of these
freedom fighters, a board-certified clinical nutritionist named
Byron J. Richards, has just published an astounding book entitled,
Fight For Your Health � Exposing the FDA�s Betrayal of America.
On page after page, Richards provides information about some of
the most egregious examples on the corruption of our medical industry,
illustrating how the FDA consistently looks the other way when evidence
of dangers to our health come to light. He also provides ample evidence
of how, under the blanket of national security as well as under
various international trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT, the
drug industry has been granted a free pass to expand its markets
without liability, while at the same time the manufacturers of natural
nutritional supplements have been subjected to all manner of convoluted
regulations geared to hinder their sales.

In fact, the
thesis of Richards� book is that the FDA has essentially betrayed
us by acting merely as a tool to forward the agendas of these other
�stakeholders� instead of regulating products for the purpose of
protecting the public. As Richards, himself, states.

�The battle
for control of your health is now under way. It is time to understand
the nature of the plan. The future well-being of our citizens
is at stake.

I
draw my sword in the form of a book.�

Reading this
book was a stunning experience for me. While I have read extensively
about the history of the development of the American health care
industry and have written and lectured on the subject for many years,
I�ve never encountered anyone who has grasped the underlying issues
more soundly than Richards has. What he has done is not only pull
together bits and pieces of information about often shocking events
that many of us are familiar with, but he has also placed all this
information into a much broader context. Thanks to Richards, we
now can see the FDA as nothing more than a bit-player in a much
larger picture which is only now just beginning to emerge, and which
has nothing to do with improving our health.

Health freedom
fighters, who have long suspected there is a dark underbelly of
powerful corporate and political interests working behind the scenes
to direct our health care policies and laws, will be pleased to
see that Richards actually shines the light of day on many such
interests. Further, he backs his thesis with 30 pages of notes,
direct quotes and helpful details designed to show how our health
care system, as well as our political system, is actually orchestrated.

According to
Richards, for over a century, thanks in part to the leadership of
several German chemical companies and others we now call �globalists,
our planet has seen the steady enactment of laws and the adoption
of regulations on a world-wide basis that advance various corporate
and political interests while at the same time establishing ever
more restrictive controls over the general public � laws and regulations
that are only now becoming obvious to anyone paying attention. The
result appears to be a steady, seemingly unstoppable march toward
corporate control of our political system, including control over
the choices that we as individuals can make over our personal health
care and medical treatment.

I am particularly
glad to see that Richards devoted several chapters to highlighting
how the German chemical dye industry emerged into the global corporate
powerhouse IG Farben. Most people writing about health freedom and
the coming corporate-driven global control of food and dietary supplements
tend avoid this discussion. Instead, Richards provides us with a
great Cliffs Notes version of how Farben came into being and how
it became the "power behind the throne" during the Hitler regime
- including its building and running of a huge factory using slave
labor housed at Auschwitz. He also points out how in the 1990s,
despite its so-called breakup after WWII, three of its most powerful
"daughter" companies, Bayer, Hoescht and BASF, laid out how Codex
would regulate dietary supplements to largely remove all but basically
useless dosage levels of dietary supplements from the market.

I think it
is important for everyone to understand the IG Farben history. Twenty
three of Farben's executives were tried at the Nuremburg War Crimes
Tribunal but were given nothing more than a slap on their wrists
because the evidence linking them to the more sensational medical
crimes against humanity had been destroyed. Most notably, Richards
points out that Bayer executive, Fritz Ter Meer, who was convicted
of war crimes in 1948 and sentenced to only seven years in prison,
ended up released early and placed on the board of directors of
Bayer in 1955, where he was quickly made chair in 1956. Ter Meer
was a principle player behind the operation of the infamous IG Farben
factory next to the death camp at Auschwitz. He was also a principle
player behind the creation of the Codex Alimentarius Commission
later in 1962.

For a more
detailed history of IG Farben, and Ter Meer's war crimes, you can
download a free copy of the book, The Crime and Punishment of
IG Farben by Joseph Borkin, of the U.S. Department of Justice,
who was responsible for the wartime investigation and prosecution
of IG Farben and associated cartels. Used bookstores also have copies
of the book. [Read]

Richards does
not review how the German medical system was transformed into a
corporate-government partnership designed to control the German
population and to provide an endless supply of human guinea pigs
for the benefit of corporate-driven medical science experiments.
I found this omission to be an important one as he has correctly
understood the direction of current laws, regulations and policies
in the United States that are geared toward using our medical system
as the vehicle for conducting unwanted medical experiments on us
as well as to track and control our behavior. This legal apparatus
is the same type of legal structure the German system had up and
running even prior to WWII. However, this omission is easily remedied
as the specifics of this part of German medical history are covered
in a paper entitled, National
Health Care: Medicine in Germany 1918-1945, written in conjunction
with an exhibit at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in
Washington, D.C.

As for the
specifics of what is happening in America with the corporatization
of our medical system, Richards illustrates with his every paragraph
and footnote that a new public health plan is being put in place
that should alarm anyone and everyone who believes in personal freedom.
I have paraphrased the key elements of this new public health plan,
as well as his list of evidence, briefly below:

1.
All personal health data is to be registered in a national database
owned by the government. Bar-coded drug labels and progress of treatment
are to be included. 2. Comprehensive �mental health� screening along with appropriate
medication will be dispensed for every child before he or she enters
school. All mental health data will also be in the national database.
The pilot project for this, Teen Screen, is already operating
in 43 states. 3. An FDA-approved computer chip will be implanted in every
American as a requirement to receive health services. It will be
programmable, contain all personal health history, and tracking
capability via satellite. The Verichip is now being marketed as
the VeriMed Patient Identification System. Eighty hospitals and
several hundred doctors have already signed up. 4. Doctors�offices are to become part of a massive �clinical
trial� for dispensing of new, unproven drugs. This is the FDA�s
top priority for the next five years. The program is called �Critical
Path to Personalized Medicine Initiative.� 5. Patients will not be legally able to sue for damages caused
by drugs. The FDA backs this Big Pharma protection. 6. The DNA of every citizen will be on file with the FDA.
Collection of this information will be in the guise of better safety
but will lead to more sophisticated ways of profiling of people
for social control. 7. International laws are being passed which allow multinational
corporations to own patents on life-science inventions related to
natural life processes as well as how nutrients and herbs work in
the body. (Ownership of these life-forms and processes gives control
of access to nutrients to corporate interests.) 8. The availability of beneficial nutritional supplements
as a health option will be gone. Big Pharma, with the help of governments
(including ours) is already targeting high-quality nutritional supplements
to get them off the market. Big Pharma is preparing to take over
this industry to protect its most profitable drugs. Part of the
goal is to patent what it can of the dietary supplement products
and to make them available by prescription only, as well as to jack
up prices for what little low quality and low dosage dietary supplements
remain on the over-the-counter market. Europeans are already seeing
this happen.

If I could
wave my magic wand, I would make sure that every thinking American
had multiple copies of Fight
For Your Health � Exposing the FDA�s Betrayal of America
so they could give them to our public servants to study. I would
also make sure that these public servants could see what folly our
country is in, because we never have had a federal agency standing
up for the health and safety of each and every one of us. The FDA
should have been that agency, but in my view it has truly betrayed
us as Richards so clearly explains.

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However, since
I am not Cinderella�s fairy godmother, the best I can do is to urge
you to buy copies of this great book to give to everyone who you
know, including your public servants, and follow the upcoming articles
its author, Byron Richards, will be contributing to NewsWithViews.com

Elissa
Meininger became a noted health policy historian as well as a political
activist after almost dying from years of mercury poisoning caused by
mercury leaching from the "silver" dental amalgam fillings in her teeth.
Bedridden and unable to carry on a coherent conversation, (and unable
to obtain a diagnosis from any of the MDs she had consulted), she turned
to a traditional naturopath who had no difficulty recognizing and explaining
the source of the large array of chronic problems from which she had suffered
most of her life. This
diagnosis saved her life, but even today, such consultation remains illegal
in many states.

Committed
to reforming the medical system, Elissa embarked over 20 years ago on
an array of projects geared to bringing enlightened medical treatment
to the American people, including providing prepared statements for various
U.S. Congressional and White House Commission hearings on health freedom
legislation and policy, and testifying numerous times before the Oklahoma
state legislature.

She
is the former Vice President of Friends of Freedom International and former
co-columnist, with Carolyn
Dean, MD/ND, of many articles posted on the NewsWithViews.com.

Currently,
Elissa's health freedom political commentary can be heard on the natural
health radio show SuperHealth, broadcast weekly on station KEBC (Information
Radio 1340 AM) in Oklahoma City.

Most
people think that The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was created to
protect the public from harm and to make sure that manufacturers followed
the law in developing, testing and marketing their products. With the
almost daily revelations about the corruption in medical research...